[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR. " ] SIR, — I happened, from indisposition,
not to have noticed as soon as I otherwise should have done, your reference to me in your recent article, "The Public Worship Bill." In general, I have no taste for self-vindication ; but you happen so ingeni- ously, though I am sure as unconsciously, to invert my whole position, practical and theoretical, upon the Worship question, that I must trouble you with a few words of explanation. You set me up upon a perch, as possibly the one member of the Church of England who wishes to make the Prayer-Book pre- cisely what it was in any given year between 1552 and 1662. So little does this describe my action, that my contention is and always has been that such a feat is equally impossible in conception and in execution. My views of the value of cere- monial worship, and of the countenance given to it in the Prayer-Book, may differ from yours, and I am, of course, par- ticularly anxious that in any settlement the party specially attached to such worship may have fair-play. But there is very little difference, if any, between the suggestions offered in your late article, and those which I have advocated, whenever I have had the opportunity, in view alike of the obscurity of the Rubrics in themselves, and of the wide and healthy differences of taste which characterise the members of that vast communion for whose benefit those Rubrics exist. This is not a position hastily taken up, in face of the complica- tions of the Public Worship Act, but one which I maintained long before any such legislation was dreamed of. I advocated the policy of give-and-take, as a member of the Ritual Commis- sion which sat from 1867 to 1870. Later on, my opposition to the Public Worship Bill was based on that principle, which also runs through my book on " Worship in the Church of England," of which the first edition appeared in 1874 ; while I took the opportunity of pressing considerations and suggestions, practi- cally identical with those contained in your article, as a mem- ber of the Select Committee which so minutely considered and so laboriously took evidence upon Mr. Salt's Public Worship Facilities Bill in 1875.—I am, Sir, &c.,
[We are sorry to have misunderstood Mr. Beresford En. Spectator.]
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